Why Wall Street's 'Eat What You Kill' Motto Is The Only Way To Live

An anonymous commenter named “Frank” wrote on an article I wrote,
“Every time Altucher opens his mouth or posts commentary, he
subtracts from the sum total of all human knowledge.”

Frank is absolutely right and I congratulate him for recognizing
that. I do subtract from the sum total of all human knowledge
when I speak. I’m not human. I hunt humans down. I then eat what
I kill.

Frank is afraid maybe that I’m trying to take too much of the
knowledge he spent 40 or 70 years learning. It’s ok, Frank. You
can keep your knowledge. I won’t take it from you. You can go
home now.

We’ve become animals in a zoo and wait for our masters to feed
us. Our masters are our bosses, the government, the shareholders
of massive corporations, the media that spoon feeds us random
doses of fear and greed. The banks that squeeze our genitals when
we try to break free.

Life only tastes good when you eat what you kill. When you hustle
for what you earn and someone pays you money in proportion to the
service you’ve offered, the idea you’ve created, your ability to
execute on it, and their ability to consume it in a way that
benefits them.

Someone asked me the other day “what does it mean when you say
you ‘eat what you kill’ “.

It means the greatest pleasure is going into the jungle and
mastering the ability to hunt and survive without the help of
masters who only pretend to guarantee our safety. Whether you’re
an entrepreneur, an employee, a student, a homemaker, a writer,
it’s time to start forgetting about all the ways the world has
promised you safety and comfort.

Human knowledge has torn apart our families, our bank accounts,
and lulled us into a creepy sense of Disney stability. A good
friend of mine was just laid off from his job of ten years. He
found out through an email and was asked to not come into work
for the rest of the week and clean out his desk when security
came in on Saturday. All of that human knowledge in an email. Ten
years of work. Time to cut costs. “What do I do
now?” he asked me.

How to Eat What You Kill:

- Don’t depend on one boss, buyer for your company,
product, service you offer, etc. Diversify everything
you can. When I was starting Stockpickr I was trying to start 9
other companies simultaneously plus was running a fund of hedge
funds. When I was trying to sell Stockpickr, I was in serious
talks with 5 other companies. When I write articles, there’s 5
different sites I write for. When I was broke and about to lose my
home, I wrote to over 100 different people to try to
build up my network. When I worked at HBO I tried to build value
in every department, all the time I was preparing my exit by
planning out my first successful startup.

- Become an expert. Read every book,
blog, website, whatever, about what you want to be an expert in.
When I began daytrading for hedge funds I must have read over 100
books on trading and investing and then wrote over 1000 programs
testing out different trading models. And I still sucked at
trading. I then spent years doing it before I felt I was halfway
decent enough to pull consistent money out. And only then hedge
funds started hiring me.

- Connect people. If you introduce
person A to person B and then person B is able to solve a pain
point in his life, then you just made a good connection. Each
connection is another string in the tightly woven net you build
that will catch you when you fall and throw you to higher heights
than you’ve ever experienced before. And you will fall. Don’t
think it can’t happen.

- Give ideas for free. If you have no
network yet then you have to build it. Nobody wants to help you
for free. They are all just trying to survive. Even billionaires
are trying to protect their luxury-soaked lifestyles plagued by
jealousies and oversexed libidos. You have to build your idea
muscle and work hard to come up with ideas that can really help
these people. Then send them the ideas for free. Not everyone
will respond, but the benefits are:

You exercise that idea muscle

Someone will respond. And that someone will make you money.
When I did this technique,one person out of the 40 gave me money
to manage. Another person hired me to write.
My life changed.

- Always work on your exit. No matter
where you are: a job, a startup, your startup, writing a column,
working at Mcdonalds, always diversify your possible exits and
begin immediately working on them. You don’t have to exit
tomorrow, but never forget that you can get that email tomorrow
that says you have to clean out your desk by Saturday. Build your
personal brand, make your boss’s contacts your contacts,
make calls, send emails, leave responses on blogs, come up with
ideas out of the scope of your job description

- Never say a bad word about
anyone. Don’t betray anyone. Don’t backstab anyone
or step on anyone’s toes. Don’t gossip.This might come into
conflict with the idea of “eating what you kill” but backstabbing
in order to do it implies you have a “scarcity” mentality. That
there isn’t enough out there unless you kill someone else in
order to get what you want. Let me tell you something: there’s
enough out there for you and me. Your competition is not other
people but the time you kill, the ill will you create, the
knowledge you neglect to learn, the connections you fail to
build, the health you sacrifice along the path, your inability to
generate ideas, the people around you who don’t support and love
your efforts, and whatever god you curse for your bad luck. Avoid
those and you avoid competition. Don’t hurt anyone.

- Don’t care what people
think. People will hate you for being a
hunter: your bosses, colleagues, partners, investors, extended
family. But they don’t have to feed your family. You do. This is
how you do it. Once you care what others think, you’ve lost. Then
you’ve just set up the same boundaries for yourself that those
other people have set up for themselves. They are all smaller
than you and live in straitjackets. It’s easy to kill someone in
a straitjacket. Don’t be one of those people.

- Create your luck. Luck doesn’t come
from god or come magically out of the air. When a runner wins a
race by a one-tenth of a second chances are he prepared more, he
studied his competition, his diet was that much better, he was
better rested, he was mentally fit, etc. Once you’ve checked all
the boxes on your preparation, guess what, you’ll be lucky. A lot of people say, for
instance, that Mark Cuban became a billionaire by luck. I
address that in this post.

- Reward is unrelated to risk. People
say, “no risk, no reward.” This is not true. I don’t like to take
risks. I have a family to feed. Don’t take risks with your kids.
Diversification is not about diversifying your cash investments,
it’s about diversifying all the sources of plenty in your life:
opportunities, knowledge, friends, networks, investments, risks,
health (physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, i.e. the Daily Practice I recommend). To eat
what you kill, minimize risk so you don’t die on the hunt. You do
that by diversifying every part of your life. The outcome of this
is that if you forgot to bring your knife on the hunt, you still
have your gun. If you forgot to bring your ideas full force into
the game, you still have your network, if you lose on one risk,
you still have the nine others. That’s where you get the reward.

- Take responsibility for all
failures.It’s your fault when you go hungry. Former
world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik said in his book, “100
selected games” that the only way to reach the highest level of
success is to develop the ability to critique your own failures.
Note the word, “ONLY” in this. Anecdote: Botvinnik used to train
by playing against someone who would blow smoke in his face so as
to get accustomed to difficult playing situations. He was the
world chess champion for 15 years.

(Botvinnik versus future world champion Bobby Fischer in 1962)

- Honesty. If you don’t ask for what
you want, chances are you won’t get it. If you don’t say what you believe, you’ll
never stand out from the 99% of people out there who hide the
truth about themselves and their desires. If you don’t stand up
and say or show how special you are, nobody will ever think you
are special. Nobody is out there advocating for you. Honesty
about what you feel, believe, know, think, want, will make you a
multi-dimensional being in a flatland world.

- Patience. Most important. A three year
old could be honest but it doesn’t mean anything. They still shit
in their pants on occasion. You need to grow up. To check all of
the boxes on the above items. To do the Daily Practice to stay in mental,
physical, emotional, spiritual shape. Toavoid crappy people, to be honest, to take
responsibility, and so on. Being a hunter is very discouraging.
Sometimes you have to go for stretches of disappointment where
there’s nothing to kill and then nothing to eat. To be honest,
I’m on a four year stretch. I’m hunting for my next kill and I
will get it. During those times its most difficult to keep
balanced and stay sane. I’ve talked many people off ledges during
these periods, including myself. It’s these times it’s
most important to only be around the people who love you, and
avoid the damaging people who will bring you to their peculiar
and particular circles of hell. You don’t want to go to hell. At
the end of the day, patience is the virtue that takes you to
heaven.

Don’t worry about adding or subtracting to the sum of human
knowledge. Human knowledge is never that great. Be better than
human.